The hard truth behind the US-Indo Pacific strategy

MOST of the world knows how to respond to the US' new National Security Strategy.

- By Mihir Sharma

As my colleague Marc Champion has written, Russia loves it. Liberal Europeans are dismayed, and the Gulf monarchies overjoyed.In the rest of Asia — and what, until now, Washington has called the Indo-Pacific — the dominant emotion is uneasiness. There are words, phrases, and entire sections in the document that are exactly what we want to hear. But the underlying worldview is at odds with its rhetoric.

The strategy promises that the US will build a military capable of deterrence in the First Island Chain and the Taiwan Strait, and an insistence that the South China Sea cannot be controlled by any one actor. There is a promise to defend "global and regional balances of power," and to fight "predatory" economic practices.

The Indo-Pacific shares all these priorities, and many are relieved that the second Trump administration has taken the trouble to restate them. And yet there's disquiet, because some of these commitments look like they have been grafted on to a strategy that could push American policy in a fundamentally different direction.

This is a startlingly ideological document even by the standards of today's Washington. It extends MAGA domestic obsessions — the border, DEI, climate denialism — beyond America's shores. US soft power is listed as one of its greatest assets, without the recognition that illiberalism and xenophobia erode its value daily.